Word: blanching
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...Northeast laid off 100 employees. To qualify for their severance money, the workers had to sign elaborate release forms pledging not to sue the utility for harassment. Four engineers say they were fired in retaliation for their testimony to the NRC four years ago on behalf of whistle blower Blanch. The company denies any connection between the layoffs and Blanch's case. That makes Blanch chuckle. "The two Georges had better watch their backs," he says. "Up at Northeast, they've got long memories...
...employees "do not trust their management enough to willingly raise concerns [because of] a 'shoot the messenger' attitude" at the company. In recent years, two dozen Millstone employees have claimed they were fired or demoted for raising safety concerns; in two cases, the NRC fined Northeast. In one, Paul Blanch, who had only recently been named engineer of the year by a leading industry journal, was subjected to company-wide harassment after he discovered that some of Millstone Unit 3's safety instrumentation didn't work properly...
Galatis had watched that case unfold. "George knew what he was getting into," says Blanch. "He knew Northeast would come after him. He knew the NRC wouldn't protect him. And he did it anyway...
...when the head of the task force left for a golf vacation a few weeks before the plant was scheduled to start up, Galatis says, he knew it wasn't a serious effort. So he made a call to Ernest Hadley, the lawyer who had defended whistle blower Blanch against Northeast two years before...
...mechanics of Hanoi's urban renewal would make any big-city mayor blanch. Renovating even a modest old building can require relocating as many as a dozen families into alternate housing, as American officials discovered when they tried to reclaim the former U.S. consulate, which they plan to take back this month. Nghien hopes Hanoi's new foreign friends will put up the $2 billion it will take to rebuild the city's ancient infrastructure. ``We are not going to be another Bangkok,'' he vows. It is going to be a long, hard fight, but that is something Hanoians...